Pre-trained transformers are popular in state-of-the-art dialogue generation (DG) systems. Such language models are, however, vulnerable to various adversarial samples as studied in traditional tasks such as text classification, which inspires our curiosity about their robustness in DG systems. One main challenge of attacking DG models is that perturbations on the current sentence can hardly degrade the response accuracy because the unchanged chat histories are also considered for decision-making. Instead of merely pursuing pitfalls of performance metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, we observe that crafting adversarial samples to force longer generation outputs benefits attack effectiveness -- the generated responses are typically irrelevant, lengthy, and repetitive. To this end, we propose a white-box multi-objective attack method called DGSlow. Specifically, DGSlow balances two objectives -- generation accuracy and length, via a gradient-based multi-objective optimizer and applies an adaptive searching mechanism to iteratively craft adversarial samples with only a few modifications. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that DGSlow could significantly degrade state-of-the-art DG models with a higher success rate than traditional accuracy-based methods. Besides, our crafted sentences also exhibit strong transferability in attacking other models.
Adversarial attack research in natural language processing (NLP) has made significant progress in designing powerful attack methods and defence approaches. However, few efforts have sought to identify which source samples are the most attackable or robust, i.e. can we determine for an unseen target model, which samples are the most vulnerable to an adversarial attack. This work formally extends the definition of sample attackability/robustness for NLP attacks. Experiments on two popular NLP datasets, four state of the art models and four different NLP adversarial attack methods, demonstrate that sample uncertainty is insufficient for describing characteristics of attackable/robust samples and hence a deep learning based detector can perform much better at identifying the most attackable and robust samples for an unseen target model. Nevertheless, further analysis finds that there is little agreement in which samples are considered the most attackable/robust across different NLP attack methods, explaining a lack of portability of attackability detection methods across attack methods.
State-of-the-art few-shot learning (FSL) methods leverage prompt-based fine-tuning to obtain remarkable results for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While much of the prior FSL methods focus on improving downstream task performance, there is a limited understanding of the adversarial robustness of such methods. In this work, we conduct an extensive study of several state-of-the-art FSL methods to assess their robustness to adversarial perturbations. To better understand the impact of various factors towards robustness (or the lack of it), we evaluate prompt-based FSL methods against fully fine-tuned models for aspects such as the use of unlabeled data, multiple prompts, number of few-shot examples, model size and type. Our results on six GLUE tasks indicate that compared to fully fine-tuned models, vanilla FSL methods lead to a notable relative drop in task performance (i.e., are less robust) in the face of adversarial perturbations. However, using (i) unlabeled data for prompt-based FSL and (ii) multiple prompts flip the trend. We further demonstrate that increasing the number of few-shot examples and model size lead to increased adversarial robustness of vanilla FSL methods. Broadly, our work sheds light on the adversarial robustness evaluation of prompt-based FSL methods for NLU tasks.
Adversarial attacks in reinforcement learning (RL) often assume highly-privileged access to the victim's parameters, environment, or data. Instead, this paper proposes a novel adversarial setting called a Cheap Talk MDP in which an Adversary can merely append deterministic messages to the Victim's observation, resulting in a minimal range of influence. The Adversary cannot occlude ground truth, influence underlying environment dynamics or reward signals, introduce non-stationarity, add stochasticity, see the Victim's actions, or access their parameters. Additionally, we present a simple meta-learning algorithm called Adversarial Cheap Talk (ACT) to train Adversaries in this setting. We demonstrate that an Adversary trained with ACT still significantly influences the Victim's training and testing performance, despite the highly constrained setting. Affecting train-time performance reveals a new attack vector and provides insight into the success and failure modes of existing RL algorithms. More specifically, we show that an ACT Adversary is capable of harming performance by interfering with the learner's function approximation, or instead helping the Victim's performance by outputting useful features. Finally, we show that an ACT Adversary can manipulate messages during train-time to directly and arbitrarily control the Victim at test-time. Project video and code are available at //sites.google.com/view/adversarial-cheap-talk
Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably their most significant impact has been in the area of computer vision where great advances have been made in challenges such as plausible image generation, image-to-image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant successes achieved to date, applying GANs to real-world problems still poses significant challenges, three of which we focus on here. These are: (1) the generation of high quality images, (2) diversity of image generation, and (3) stable training. Focusing on the degree to which popular GAN technologies have made progress against these challenges, we provide a detailed review of the state of the art in GAN-related research in the published scientific literature. We further structure this review through a convenient taxonomy we have adopted based on variations in GAN architectures and loss functions. While several reviews for GANs have been presented to date, none have considered the status of this field based on their progress towards addressing practical challenges relevant to computer vision. Accordingly, we review and critically discuss the most popular architecture-variant, and loss-variant GANs, for tackling these challenges. Our objective is to provide an overview as well as a critical analysis of the status of GAN research in terms of relevant progress towards important computer vision application requirements. As we do this we also discuss the most compelling applications in computer vision in which GANs have demonstrated considerable success along with some suggestions for future research directions. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on //github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
Deep Learning algorithms have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for Image Classification and have been used even in security-critical applications, such as biometric recognition systems and self-driving cars. However, recent works have shown those algorithms, which can even surpass the human capabilities, are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In Computer Vision, adversarial examples are images containing subtle perturbations generated by malicious optimization algorithms in order to fool classifiers. As an attempt to mitigate these vulnerabilities, numerous countermeasures have been constantly proposed in literature. Nevertheless, devising an efficient defense mechanism has proven to be a difficult task, since many approaches have already shown to be ineffective to adaptive attackers. Thus, this self-containing paper aims to provide all readerships with a review of the latest research progress on Adversarial Machine Learning in Image Classification, however with a defender's perspective. Here, novel taxonomies for categorizing adversarial attacks and defenses are introduced and discussions about the existence of adversarial examples are provided. Further, in contrast to exisiting surveys, it is also given relevant guidance that should be taken into consideration by researchers when devising and evaluating defenses. Finally, based on the reviewed literature, it is discussed some promising paths for future research.
Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at //github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably the revolutionary techniques are in the area of computer vision such as plausible image generation, image to image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant success achieved in computer vision field, applying GANs over real-world problems still have three main challenges: (1) High quality image generation; (2) Diverse image generation; and (3) Stable training. Considering numerous GAN-related research in the literature, we provide a study on the architecture-variants and loss-variants, which are proposed to handle these three challenges from two perspectives. We propose loss and architecture-variants for classifying most popular GANs, and discuss the potential improvements with focusing on these two aspects. While several reviews for GANs have been presented, there is no work focusing on the review of GAN-variants based on handling challenges mentioned above. In this paper, we review and critically discuss 7 architecture-variant GANs and 9 loss-variant GANs for remedying those three challenges. The objective of this review is to provide an insight on the footprint that current GANs research focuses on the performance improvement. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on //github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan